We demonstrate that community councillors engage with a range of information sources and tools in their work, the most important of which derives from local authorities. We highlight a number of ways in which community councillors could be better supported in their information use, and conclude with a set of recommendations that relate to (i) information literacy training; (ii) valuing information skills…

A paper written by Hazel, Peter Cruickshank and Bruce, addressing the question of network sustainability within a community of library and information science (LIS) researchers and practitioner researchers has now been accepted for publication in the Journal of Documentation. Please read more about it in Hazel’s blog post, or, if you would like to learn more about the results of this study, please email Hazel at: h.hall@napier.ac.uk.

IL-DEM was funded by the CILIP Information Literacy Group in 2016 to investigate the ways in which community-level elected representatives (community councillors, working as unpaid volunteer members of community councils) in Scotland undertake two related information activities: (i) seeking and sharing the opinions of the citizens that they represent with higher…

In previous research, we have observed the poor record of online engagement of community councils in Scotland, though I doubt this is issue is restricted only to this context. With some notable exceptions, Community Council online presences are characterised by low activity. Only around a quarter are actively online whether on Facebook or web, and even when there are high levels of primary postings, there is low secondary engagement in the form of comments or responses, never mind sustained online debate.

This has been characterised as “lurking”.

The question I am exploring at the moment is:

To what extent is a passive audience (lurking) an issue to community representatives when they are posting material online?

One question this raises is why so few citizens participate online. This has been one theme of (e-participation) research into online democratic processes since the field began at the start of the millennium. There has…